8/31/2010
EDUJOBS: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?
With many schools across the country now back in session, our skepticism about the layoff figures used to justify the $10 billion Edujobs payout to states has only grown. Our own research tells a very different story than what's been reported in the press.
To begin, we were certainly not the only ones baffled by how the Feds arrived at their estimate of 160,000 teachers destined to be laid off if action was not taken. The estimate didn't match what we were actually seeing in districts (see here and here for example) or even what the unions themselves projected.
For example, Maryland will get funds for 2,500 teaching jobs, but none of the largest districts (Baltimore, Montgomery or Prince George's) were planning on laying off teachers this year.
Don't get us wrong; it isn't that school districts are rolling in money. It's just that they have used, as the results of our own informal survey below shows, other (and we'd argue, smarter) measures like wage freezes, attrition and benefits concessions to avoid laying off teachers.
We also decided to call the Council of Economic Advisors, the folks charged with coming up with the projections for the bill, to find out how it arrived at the 160,000 estimate. It turns out the numbers it cited were not based on any actual need reported by districts or their states. They never surveyed districts on how many layoffs they were facing nor did they collect data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Rather, the 160,000 figure is simply based on how many jobs $10 billion could fund. By borrowing against such 'expendable' expenses as food stamps, Congress came up the with $10 billion figure and the White House calculated how many jobs $10 billion could support--which is not the same thing at all as jobs $10 billion could save.
The way the funding works, not surprising to anyone familiar with federal funding, is that each state, regardless of need or how hard hit its schools were, then received a proportional share.
Of course, as most by now know, that is not how this issue has been presented to the public. Even when questioned by USA Today's Greg Toppo on how the figures came about, Arne Duncan said, "We think this number is fairly solid, and this is based upon actual -- you know the need and cuts we're seeing around the country."
Many questions remain: Was this a handout to the unions? Will states that have avoided layoffs by other cost saving measures increase their payrolls this year, only to have to lay off their new hires next year when funds dry up? Time will tell.
Update: After publication we learned that San Francisco rehired 208 of its laid off teachers.
GUEST EDITORIAL
Irony in the Battle over Teacher Effectiveness
by Dan Goldhaber and Jane Hannaway
The August 16 Los Angeles Times article on the effectiveness of LA teachers has created a major brouhaha. The paper promised to publish measures of individual teachers' effectiveness. Drastic change in school management may well be in the making, but not without a battle royal. Powerful sides are lining up and the stakes are high.
The U.S. Secretary of Education and numerous superintendents endorsed the idea of letting parents know the estimated effectiveness of their children's teachers, but the local teachers union is organizing a boycott of the LA Times, and pressure to keep teacher performance estimates under wraps is mounting. There is good evidence that pressure works. In New York, unions previously got the state legislature to add a clause in a budget bill that prevented using student achievement to inform teacher performance evaluations.
Behind this firestorm is deep research. Evidence has long shown tremendous variation in how effective individual teachers are. The difference between having a top-notch and a bottom-drawer teacher can be more than a year's worth of learning growth. Such findings, corroborated by principals' casual observations, hold true across states, districts, researchers, and tests. Yet school districts rarely act on it--for good reasons and for bad.
Much of the debate over evaluating teachers has centered on a technical point--the use of so called value-added estimates of effectiveness that use student test scores. This is wonk speak for a statistical approach designed to separate out teachers' contributions to student achievement from other influences on learning. Opponents of this approach think the measures are misleading and overcomplicated, and, at a deep level, question whether student tests should be the basis for evaluation anyway. Proponents seek fairness and say that only a sophisticated approach like this can distinguish between a teacher's influence and what a student brings into a teacher's classroom. Critics argue that tests capture only part of what students learn while advocates claim that what is tested is still important. Opponents argue that the estimates are not accurate. Proponents counter that, while not perfect, the measures contain valuable information--some of it predictive of future performance--worth considering along side classroom observations and other indicators of quality.
School districts avoid using this information largely to avoid political heat, especially from unions. But the big stir caused by the Times' plan to make it public could have been skirted entirely. Had the LA School System used the value-added estimates to inform their evaluation of teachers, the data would have been part of teachers' confidential personnel files and not open to the public. Instead, the district long ignored its own data, leaving it fair game, embarrassing many teachers, at least some of whom could have used the data constructively in a supportive setting.
The deeper story within the story here is that it's risky for school districts to ignore teacher performance information. But the kerfuffle in LA is also an opportunity for districts and unions to use the external pressure to move past the tired debates about whether value-added ought to be used, and toward a discussion of how best it might be used in conjunction with other measures to assess teachers.
We are at a crucial decision point. The worn-out politics of the past can only hold the educational enterprise back, harming teachers caught in ugly political battles, and kids stuck with the weakest teachers.
Dan Goldhaber is the Director of the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington Bothell.
Jane Hannaway is the Director of the Urban Institute's Education Policy Center and CALDER, one of the federally funded National Research and Development Centers
LOUISIANA! YOU GOTTA PLAY FAIR!
Louisiana, the state that's way ahead of the pack when it comes to determining the value added by teacher preparation programs, has released its annual report card and, again, teachers trained by The New Teacher Project (TNTP) come out on top. TNTP teachers not only appear to outperform other new teachers, but they also outperform teachers with three or more years of experience.
While the fact that TNTP teachers stack up so well against experienced teachers warrants some boasting and perhaps makes everything else we have to say here irrelevant, our sense of justice has gotten the better of us. As we observed last year, Louisiana officials use a methodology that defies logic (see our past coverage of this study). Much of the reason TNTP compares so well to other new teachers is because the study compares second-year TNTP teachers with first-year teachers fresh from undergraduate programs. No need to read that sentence again; you read it right the first time.
When we once again asked the Louisiana Regents why it makes any sense to compare teachers with a year of experience to those with none--given that the biggest jump any teacher makes in effectiveness is between the first and second years of experience, hands down--the response didn't make us feel any better. Technically speaking as only technocrats can, they view TNTP's first year in the classroom as the official student teaching year, in spite of the fact that these alt cert teachers are assigned as the teacher of record and are under little to no supervision. In effect, they equate the first year to the one semester of traditional student teaching required of undergraduates.
Also important to note is that you can't find any of this information in the actual report.
THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP: CAN WE FORCE HISTORY TO REPEAT ITSELF?
Last month we were pleased to see an evaluation of Florida's Reading First program, showing big reading gains across the board for students in participating schools. But we were equally frustrated to see that those good results didn't translate into any impact on the racial achievement gap. Black kids' scores went way up, but the White kids matched them point for point.
If a program that clearly works can't move the needle on the achievement gap, what can? Unfortunately, there are few successes, at least in recent history, upon which we can draw.
Accordingly, we seized upon a new ETS paper reviewing the history of the achievement gap, particularly a period in the 1980s when the gap narrowed by roughly 25 percent. Researchers Paul E. Barton and Richard Coley explore some of the more plausible theories behind the 1980s success and also why that progress ended rather abruptly in the 1990s, without having budged much since--in spite of much, much effort.
Given the pressure many educators and politicians feel to make progress on the achievement gap, Barton and Coley's exercise represents risky business, particularly since their paper is directed at policymakers, not more discerning (and hypercritical) academics. Putting a theory out there, however delicately,explaining the success of the 1980s could very well lead to costly, systemic changes urged on by policymakers desperate to replicate that progress.
That's why our eyebrows nearly touched our hairline reading that the theory Barton and Coley find most plausible (see chart) was the big class size reductions that took place throughout that decade.
Given the platform, Barton and Coley understandably don't provide much of the supporting research for this contention, just that the nationwide reduction in class size throughout the 1970s and 80s tracks better than other theories with the increasing achievement levels by Blacks during this same period. They also point to statements by other researchers that Blacks may be more sensitive than Whites to class sizes.
More importantly, though, we don't hear anything about other research that directly contradicts this theory, primarily a 2001 paper by Eric Hanushek, in which he rules class size out rather persuasively (and certainly a lot more scientifically).
In his 2001 paper and since, Hanushek remains convinced that it is desegregation that explains the narrowing of the gap. For the most part, Barton and Coley dismiss desegregation as a major factor, unable to reconcile big regional differences in the rate at which schools desegregated-even though Hanushek clearly accommodates these differences in his own research.
There is, however, quite a compelling section to this paper, addressing the sociological factors which may be neutralizing schools' hard work. Barton and Coley do an impressive job examining highly-charged social issues that often are avoided for fear of offending. Their list is long, depressing and persuasive: too many fatherless families; the plight of so many unemployed and/or imprisoned black males; the growth of "hip hop' culture; an aversion to "acting white"; disparities in net worth and family wealth; the relatively low rate of upward mobility between generations; differences in child rearing practices; and, perhaps most convincingly, the academic consequences reaped on children who have to grow up in high-poverty, blighted neighborhoods.
The authors observe that half a century ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an Assistant Secretary for Labor, was pilloried for his prescient observations about alarming rates of out-of-wedlock births among Blacks. At least when it comes to discussing the causes of the achievement gap, some progress appears to have been made.
Factors that might explain why the Achievement Gap narrowed in the 1980s
TOUCHING THE UNTOUCHABLES: PENSIONS AND BENEFITS
Promise you won't yawn? We need to talk teacher pensions.
Though long overdue, some states are finally acknowledging the fact that their public pension systems are egregiously underfunded. In Oklahoma, for instance, the struggling pension program there won't be getting its annual $35 million obligatory payment from its State Board of Education. Due to the state's budget crunch, the legislature 'removed' (wink, wink) the annual requirement imposed on the Board.
With the flexibility to then use that money as it saw fit, the Board of Ed decided to pay its escalating health care bill instead (a morass comparable to that of pensions). The pension board is deciding if it will sue.
Meanwhile, retirement benefits all over the country are taking it in the neck.
Colorado and Minnesota are being sued for cutting annual cost of living increases for already retired state and municipal workers. And then there's New Jersey, called out by the SEC for pension fraud. The state claimed it had been properly funding public workers' pensions when, in actuality, it was not.
According to a study by the Pew Center on the States (link),there is currently a $1 trillion gap between what states have promised workers in terms of pension, health care, and other benefits and the dollars they have on hand.
POLICY LESSONS ON VAM FOR YOU LUCKY RTT STATES
There is a lot of confusion over the accuracy of using valued-added measures (VAMs) to judge teacher performance. Is one year's data ever enough to judge performance? Is VAM useful for estimating the performance of all teachers or just those at the extreme ends, i.e., the very best and very worst?
Researchers, Peter Schochet and Hanley Chiang of Mathematica Policy Research mine the cavernous depths of VAM data now available from districts all over the country and conduct simulations to try to address these questions. What they show is not new, but it is interesting and useful.
For example, if a district were to target teachers who were at or below the 18th percentile of performance for some negative consequence (e.g. probation, dismissal, denial of tenure) and used three years of data to calculate that estimate, the VAM estimates would be "wrong" for one out of four teachers (meaning that those teachers were actually stronger performers than the three year calculation showed). If a district relied on only one year of data, the VAM estimates would be "wrong" for one out of every three teachers. However, if a district were to try and identify fewer teachers at the bottom end, say, at or below the 8th percentile, and used three years of data, the accuracy rate would be much improved. Then the VAM estimate would only be wrong for only one out of six teachers.
You might be thinking: wait, if teachers teach the students who take the tests that are used to calculate the VAM, how can they be misclassified? In short, teachers are not the only contributors to student performance. Some classrooms may have more resources, fewer disruptions and/or less needy students, all of which will impact student and therefore teacher performance. This variation in classrooms must be controlled for to assure valid calculations and teacher-to-teacher comparisons. Moreover, some schools may have more resources, better leadership, more capable teachers and/or less needy students than others, which will systematically impact school performance. Again, VAM calculations must remove these resource differences to assure proper comparisons.
Even with these caveats, the authors note that VAMs have distinct advantages to other measures of teacher quality: they are better predictors of subsequent-year outcomes in classrooms than credentials, education, experience or even observational measures.
TALKING TOUGH: JUST HOW GOOD DOES A TEACHER NEED TO BE?
There's plenty of debate about the need to take ineffective teachers off the payroll, but where does the line get drawn between "effective enough" and ineffective? Looking at patterns of performance, Doug Staiger and Jonah Rockoff estimate that as many as 80 percent of all new teachers should be let go, and with haste.
Even factoring in a flawed teacher evaluation system that all too often means plenty of misses (and some friendly fire), they argue that the benefits to student achievement are too big not to make such a move. In terms of student achievement, the cost of keeping an ineffective teacher is far greater than the cost of accidentally firing a good one. According to Staiger and Rockoff, a 0.1 standard deviation drop in a student's learning in a single year corresponds to a $10,000 to $25,000 decrease in that student's earnings as an adult, much greater than the cost of hiring a new teacher.
Not pulling any punches, their model shows that waiting two or three years to gather more detailed information on teachers having been pegged as low performing will only diminish what otherwise would be blockbuster student results. Still more punch could be gotten if districts improved their evaluation processes, and even more still if they did a better job identifying potential recruits at the point of hire who are most likely to succeed.
Staiger and Rockoff aren't completely hard-nosed. While asserting that the very worst teacher should be fired immediately, they note that waiting an extra year or two to assess borderline teachers would still benefit kids.
Some bold postulations for sure, but we're made a little nervous by the sterile lab conditions. There's an imperative lesson herein, but it shouldn't be wholesale firings, but an end to a national system of teacher preparation that screens too few aspirants and then far too often adds no value. In fact, Staiger and Rockoff suggest that anyone with a college degree be allowed to teach, and that good teachers be identified after entering the classroom. Pre-service teacher education may appear to many to be worthless, but its questionable value should shock us into action, not resignation.
RULES OR NOT, TEACHERS MAKE RATIONAL DECISIONS (UPDATE)
We have removed our review of CRPE's study on seniority staffing and its relation to teacher turnover. After learning the identification of the district in the study, we realized that the authors did not apply the same definition to "mutual consent" that we have used to denote a policy which never places a teacher in a building without both the principal's and teacher's consent. In the district in question, mutual consent hiring exists for only a portion of the transfer season and 40 percent of teachers are still "forced placed" into assignments. With this knowledge, it would be inaccurate to conclude that a shift to mutual consent hiring failed to equalize disparate experience levels among schools.
TEACHER ATTRITION: WE'RE BUSTING ALL THE MYTHS
Here's some new evidence that not as many new teachers are leaving the profession as it's popular to assert. 2007-2008 data from the Schools and Staffing Survey report the following: Of public school teachers across the country with 1 to 3 years of experience, 77 percent stick around at their original schools, 13.7 percent change schools, and 9.1 percent leave teaching. That's a far cry from the claims that the number of new teachers leaving after a couple of years is as high as 50 percent. And,we can probably chalk up the large percentage of movers to the fact that teachers tend to move schools looking for the best "fit".
What the new stats don't tell us, though, is what the rate of departure from teaching is for the more challenging districts. That, we suspect,would paint a much less rosy picture.
TQ Bulletin Volume 11, Number 8
| TQBulletin is a monthly publication of the National Council on Teacher Quality, nonpartisan research and advocacy group committed to restructuring the teaching profession, led by our vision that every child deserves effective teachers. |
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Cartoons by David Flanagan
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2009 State Teacher Policy Yearbook |
| NCTQ's annual 52-volume report on state policies that impact the teaching profession. This year's edition is a comprehensive analysis of all aspects of states' teacher policies including key policy areas such as teacher preparation, evaluation, tenure and dismissal, alternative certification and compensation. |
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+ Visit the 2008 website |
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+ Visit the 2007 website |
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Tackling the STEM crisis: Five steps your state can take to improve the quality and quantity of its K-12 math and science teachers, June 2009 |
| Strong K-12 math and science preparation ensures that college freshmen are capable of diving into demanding STEM* majors rather than treading water in remedial courses. That's better for them and for our nation's future. State laws and regulations can help to build a bigger and better pipeline of K-12 teachers who will savor, not skirt, rigorous math and science instruction.
*Science, technology, engineering and mathematics |
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No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America's Education Schools, June 2008 |
| American students' chronically poor performance in mathematics on international tests may begin in the earliest grades, handicapped by the weak knowledge of mathematics of their own elementary teachers. NCTQ looks at the quality of preparation provided by a representative sampling of institutions in nearly every state. We also provide a test developed by leading mathematicians which assesses for the knowledge that elementary teachers should acquire during their preparation. Imagine the implications of an elementary teaching force being able to pass this test. |
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Teacher Rules, Roles and Rights |
| Explore the intricacies of collective bargaining agreements, board policies, and teacher handbooks. TR3 has data from 100 school districts and all 50 states. These 100 districts represent 20 percent of public school students in the United States. |
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Alternative Certification Isn't Alternative, September 2007 |
| A new report from NCTQ and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, examines the current realities of alternate routes, originally intended as a fast track way to get talented individuals into teaching. |
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What Education Schools Aren't Teaching About Reading and What Elementary Teachers Aren't Learning |
| In this groundbreaking report, NCTQ studied a large representative sampling of ed schools to find out what future elementary teachers are--and are not--learning about reading instruction. The report, the most comprehensive of its kind, determined that education schools are ignoring the principles of good reading instruction that would prepare prospective teachers how to better teach reading. |
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